The Mark Perlberg CPA Podcast
The Mark Perlberg CPA Podcast
EP 63 - Leveraging Your Tax Team to Maximize Wealth & Savings w/ Eric Cooper
Join our special guest, Eric Cooper, founder of Sooner Private Financial Council and Sooner Business Advisors. Eric joins us to share his expertise on the power of teamwork in maximizing your wealth while minimizing taxes. Learn how affluent individuals and business owners can benefit from having a unified team of advisors who work seamlessly together, ensuring that your financial strategies are both efficient and effective.
Learn how general financial advisors, CPAs, and attorneys can collaborate to optimize your wealth management. Eric walks us through practical examples, such as utilizing Opportunity Zone investments and derivatives, that illustrate how an integrated approach to tax planning can lead to substantial financial gains and reduced tax liabilities. We dig into the importance of proactive planning to secure your financial future without falling into the trap of proportional tax increases.
We also explore the holistic benefits of coordinated financial planning and the peace of mind it brings. Eric emphasizes the importance of taking inventory of your current team, identifying any gaps, and fostering better communication among your advisors. Plus, get a sneak peek into our upcoming live events in the Northeast and St. Petersburg, Florida, where you'll gain even more insights into effective estate planning, tax efficiency, and wealth building. Don’t miss this chance to elevate your financial strategy and safeguard your legacy.
To learn more about Eric, email:eric.cooper@soonerpfc.com
All right, welcome. I'm so excited to have another financial wizard on the show. We are going to talk about the topic of aligning your tax team, having everybody work together as a team on your financials to maximize your ability to protect you from the IRS, build your wealth, grow it tax-free, minimize your taxes and prevent future taxation. So I'm about to introduce Eric, but before I do, if you're at all interested in any of our services or you want to join our team, just go to markperlbergcpacom where you can apply to bea client or a staff member. As we're always hiring Eric. Can you introduce yourself in 60 seconds or less?
Speaker 2:You know I've never been accused of being brief, but I can certainly do that, mark. So my name is Eric Cooper and I'm the founder of the Sooner Private Financial Council, a financial planning firm based out here in the Northeast, and also Sooner Business Advisors, an exit and succession planning consulting firm. This is my 11th year in financial services Absolutely love what I do and what we really do and work with folks like Mark is to understand how all these different areas of financial decision-making talk to each other so that people can do the best they can with what they have. We like to say that this is really my belief in why I launched the company. We like to say that what we know about money, which is a lot, only matters in the context of why you care about money, and making the connection of those two things is why we exist, it's why we work with clients and it's why we align with great, great firms like yours, mark.
Speaker 1:And we're able to, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Yeah, absolutely, and it's. It's really, as you become more affluent, as you go from six figures to seven figures to eight figures and we talked to a lot of clients that are very successful entrepreneurs or highly paid W-2 folks, c-level W-2s, seven and eight figure business owners, paid W-2 folks, c-level W-2s, seven and eight figure business owners. As you accumulate more wealth and more cash and more assets, the team that you're consulting with is going to grow and their specializations are going to be more unique. So not only should you have someone who does your taxes, you need someone who thinks strategically about your taxes in all elements. So they're looking at you, your business, your family, your children, your estate plan. So now you need to align with an estate attorney. You should probably have a trust. You should also have an asset protection plan.
Speaker 1:There are so many important features to evaluate as business owners and affluent investors and people who are accumulating wealth. So, just like you may have seen old videos of Jeff Bezos when he used to still drive a Honda Civic, when he was like a multi-millionaire, he said, hey, it's a good car, the Civic hasn't really caught up to his level of what he really needs to show up, and what we see is a lot of folks. There's a real need to evolve and not only get the right people, but have them all working on the same page. What have you seen with some of the people? You work with people but have them all working on the same page.
Speaker 2:What have you seen with some of the people you work with? Well, I see a lot of disjointedness. I see a lot of what got you here won't get you there, because what happens in reality is a lot of times this success is incremental and if you're an entrepreneur, it's not necessarily a line like this. There may be peaks and valleys, but over the course of time you're moving up the chain and with every level of success comes another layer of complexity. So what you currently see is that people add to their team right. So with every layer of success and complexity, they add a new CPA firm, they add a new business consultant that focuses on profitability or cost segregation, or whatever the case may be. Maybe they add another couple advisors that specialize in estate planning and they keep some money over here with this advisory firm and they've got other money over here. And what you see is people understandably so, because they have good relationships are reticent to replace advisors that they've grown with. And then what you also see is that, because not all these needs are showing up simultaneously, you have clients adding advisors, kind of as they go along and in a reactionary manner, there's some sort of trigger event that happens where they're like okay, now I need to go talk to somebody about this. Or my CPA said that I should talk to somebody about this and he knows this consultant and what you see is a lot of redundancy and inefficiency on those teams, because you have a lot of smart people that are really good at what they do, but they don't necessarily have an understanding of all the other financial strategies and decisions that that affluent client is making simultaneously and how their advice might interact with everything else. There's a lack of communication between those teams of professionals because a lot of them view each other as being competitors with one another or they want the inside track on being the primary advisor to that affluent client. So you don't see a lot of collaboration there and what you get is you know if you can imagine a wagon wheel, right, you know, with that center in the middle, the clients in that center, and you've got all these different spokes coming out right and you've got your private investment manager. You've got all these different spokes coming out right and you've got your private investment manager. You've got your venture capital and private equity guy. You have your. You know you've got your bank, maybe your private banking services, you have your CPA team, you have your business consultants, you have your insurance firm, you have all these different financial services advisors and vendors and providers.
Speaker 2:But between each one of those spokes there's just massive gaps and through those gaps are falling money that's going to the IRS that could be kept in your pocket, money going to financial institutions that could be kept in your pocket, money going to professional services that are redundant that could be kept in your pocket. And ultimately it's not just about the money bleeding, it's about your outcomes being less efficient, right, because you're not taking the shortest path to doing the best you can with what you have. So when you kind of approach the idea of a financial counselor, a board of directors, it's this idea of you know who's really dedicated to the game of understanding how to build the right team, who should be on the team and when. How do we organize, how do we orchestrate communication and strategies between all these different financial inputs so that that entrepreneur's financial life kind of becomes a company. And they've got a board of directors that are all working in concert for their best interests.
Speaker 2:And that's why conversations like this are so important, because you know it might sound a little abstract, but this has real impact. I know you've seen it. You could probably talk about a bunch of case studies and folks you've worked with to the tune of six figures, seven figures, eight figures in lost wealth when this type of orchestration doesn't happen and when it doesn't happen early enough. When it doesn't happen early enough, right, kind of like chess you got to be thinking the next step ahead. It's not good enough to do it on a reactionary basis. You know, as you achieve different levels of success, you got to be looking down the road and saying, in order to get to where I'm going, or do the best I can with what I have, I should invest the time to building the right team that can grow with me, no matter what level of success I achieve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I can give you. Let's talk about some specific examples here, and I can give you some as well where you also want to get a second opinion on some of these things. So we've had an instance where a client had an asset protection plan proposed to them very robust, and they're like what are your thoughts? Well, if we do this, you may have more asset protection. However, as a disadvantage, the reporting requirements are going to be so cumbersome. You're going to be miserable during tax season because now we have to add all these entities and now we have to tie. We're going from our schedule ease to doing 1065s with balance sheets. Your fees are going to double and it's going to take three times as long to do your returns.
Speaker 1:But those weren't considered in our conversations. And then I've had instances where we had a client who just would never respond to our messages and then by the time we do the returns, we find out they had a capital gains of about $300,000. They didn't even know there was a capital gains event. So not only was the financial advisors not and notifying them of these taxable events, because these guys were senior citizens and just didn't know what was going on, so these guys didn't know to notify us because they didn't even know there was a capital gains event and we could have done some wonderful things for them because they were about to retire. They wanted to be passive. They had rep status. We could have deferred 100% of that with a qualified opportunity zone fund. A cost tag on that qualified opportunity zone would have reduced their taxes and they likely would have been toward retirement when they would recognize the taxes. So a portion of it would be completely untaxed first $90,000 untaxed and then they would have a tax-free exit that their children could inherit if they didn't do it themselves.
Speaker 1:So many interesting things that could have been accomplished if we were collaborating with their financial team. But they left us all in our individual silos and not as much was accomplished because of this and other times we've had successes where we found a loss. We created maximum losses for the client. It allowed us to do some Roth conversions, grow the money tax-free, completely offset any taxation on those tax-deferred accounts. So instead of having a ticking time bomb in a 401k or an IRA, now you're growing this tax-free vehicle in your Roth IRA that'll never pay taxes again. So there's so many ways we can be proactive when everybody is aligned and communicating on all their different assets and sources of wealth and things impacting them 100% and what's really sad about it is that really what prevents that from happening.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes is us right. The client doesn't know what they don't know. The client's incredibly good at what they do. They've reached a level of affluency and success because they're really good at what they do. But oftentimes it's the professionals right when, you know, a lot of times there might be ego involved, right Like.
Speaker 2:I have no problem saying there's way too much in complex financial services for me to know everything. I need a Mark. I need somebody like Mark to be as valuable as I can possibly be to the client. I'm really really good at what I do, right, but I can't be a Mark. There's not enough me to be an Eric and to be a Mark and to be a you know whoever else is on the team. So there's this idea of like, hey, if we can kind of get out of our own way and think bigger than just the products and services that we sell and monetize, and if we think about how we can achieve the most meaningful and powerful outcomes for clients. It always leads to collaboration and I love a lot of what you said right there, because there's so many things that you said that a lot of people listening to this probably have never heard of People that are really smart, people that keep up with tax law, people that maybe have been doing their own taxes for a while, but you spend all day, every day, in this helping people do this.
Speaker 2:And on the other side, right from the planning perspective whether we're talking investments or private investments, or whether we're talking about ventures or whether we're talking about whatever the case is I'm really looking at over the course of time, not only how do we build the wealth, but how do we reduce the taxation over time. How is how your assets are positioned in retirement going to affect things like Social Security, your Medicare premiums required minimum distributions, the efficiency of passing your legacy along, the efficiency of how you exit your business? Right? When are the cash flow and capital requirements going to hit from this ticking time bomb of taxation, right? What liquidity is that going to force us to have? How is that going to back into our investment strategies? And, oh, by the way, for the money that you have that you're growing, whether it's real estate or whether it's capital investments or whatever the case is are there any strategic opportunities to manufacture carryover losses so that we can be efficient year to year in how we do this. Right. I'm looking at this on a macro level. You're looking at this also on a macro level.
Speaker 2:But a lot of what you do Right the changes in tax law you're intimately familiar with. There's a lot of strategies that you're familiar with that you could even bring to my attention in particular situations and say, hey, eric, this is what you're trying to accomplish over here In the big picture. Now, this is where we can help you execute that. We've got strategies in place, right, we've got tools in place that you might not be aware of, eric. And if I'm able to have that conversation with you, even if the client's not on the call, right, if we're in regular communication, I'm like, hey, mark, here's what we're going to do.
Speaker 2:How does this affect your end of it? Help me understand. Are there any tools that I'm missing that we can leverage to create the best outcome for the client? That kind of conversation in our industry doesn't really happen and most of it, I find, boils down to ego, or it boils down to protecting our lines of revenue, because we don't want to get stepped on, but abundance mentality. There's a lot of clients out there. There's a lot of people that need our help and if we figure out effective ways to collaborate, imagine the impact that we can have on the people that use our services. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and with the right, when people need that level of advisory.
Speaker 1:I can only go so far in certain areas as well, where, in particular, when I get questions on estate planning and taxation strategies. With estate planning, I mean, I can talk a lot about step-up basis and some general strategies, some trust structure strategies. But you have other professionals who talk about estate planning all day long and there's no way that I'm going to pretend that I'm an estate planning expert here or international taxation planning. So when you're at a certain level, you can rely on some general knowledge of the advisor and they can facilitate certain things. But certainly when we're looking at seven and eight figures or nine figures of wealth, it's worth a little bit of extra investment into those specialized professionals and bringing them all together here. Those specialized professionals and bringing them all together here, what are your tell me about some of the? Can you tell me about some, maybe some more specific examples of things you've seen where you were able to reach out to other members of the client's tax teams or their CPAs or their attorneys and other resources to create that synergy?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well, one of them you mentioned already, which was the opportunity zones. Opportunity zone funds, whether that's the OZ ETF or private investments, where people have the ability to take money that they're investing that's not in a retirement account and be able to, if they hold it long enough, not pay any capital gains tax. What we see a lot of times is tax planning tends to be reactionary. Right, we're looking back at last year. It's like, you know, if you go to a restaurant and your waiter waits on you and at the end of the meal they come and they bring the bill and say, okay, here's the bill, no rush, you know, put your card down when you're ready, all they're doing is telling what you did and telling you what you owe, and a lot of tax planning I put in quotes is really like that. It's really reactionary. Well, there was this one conversation I had with some Opportunity Zone experts that were partnered with a CPA firm and this particular client millions of dollars, right, so probably seven figures high, seven figures in total invested assets. Most of that was non-qualified money. Most of it was not retirement money, as it tends to be. They'd sold some real estate, they'd made some really good money, and there were two things we ended up doing in that particular case. So one of the things was we were able to factor in some of those opportunity zone investments into the portfolio and make adjustments elsewhere in the portfolio to account for all the asset allocation metrics and concentration metrics. So we were able to take maybe about a quarter of their portfolio and position it in a way where they don't need it for liquidity. They're planning a long-term hold and they're going to owe no capital gains on that. We were able to take some of their other money and we were able to use some strategies that we were able to use derivatives to actually produce ordinary income losses right, which is different than a capital loss. We were able to produce about 70 to 80,000 of ordinary income losses per million invested, which went right against their W-2 income, right.
Speaker 2:And all of those ideas didn't come from right here. All those ideas came because of the team that I have around me. They came because of the CPAs that I talked to. They came because of the attorneys I talked to, where I was able to collaboratively without the client in the room, say, hey, here's what we're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 2:A lot of people, once they've amassed a certain amount of wealth, if they've got liquid money or they've got real estate or whatever the case is, particularly with liquid money, the compounding of the taxation really gets them, because you might have a bunch of stuff that's at long-term capital gains. But if you've got to rebalance that portfolio, we're realizing a bunch of those gains and now we've got to dish it out elsewhere and we're creating another tax hit. We're creating another tax hit. We're creating another tax hit, right, and we want to grow that money, but we want to grow that money in a way where the taxes, the tax hit, isn't growing proportionately with how big the balance sheet is growing, and oftentimes you don't have enough write-offs to really compensate for that.
Speaker 2:Business owners love to talk about write-offs, but to write it off you actually have to spend the money, right, so it's not like a one-to-one swap. There's only so many write-offs you can have if you're going to have an income and you're going to make a profit. So how else can we get strategic about this? How can we use tools like insurance to basically have indefinite tax deferral on a portion of your money? There are drawbacks to that too, right, but how do we look at all the tools that we have available to not just reduce the taxation for taxation's sake but orchestrate this so that we're reducing the taxes where we can, reducing financial institution fees where we can and still staying true to the tenets of building wealth right, because it doesn't matter if you're at a tax-efficient investment. If the investment's a bad investment it's not worth doing right. So, hey, we can talk about capital losses all we want, but it's easy to go lose money if we're just trying to lose money. But that's not what anyone's trying to do. We're trying to make money and reduce the tax drag.
Speaker 2:And those two concepts are concepts that came from not financial advisors, they came from tax people and they came from attorneys. And that was a direct result of the type of collaboration we're talking about. And when you spider that out over the next 10 to 15 years that this client has until their retirement I put that in quotes because retirement planning is kind of like this weird game we're often solving as an industry for a problem that doesn't exist. How many clients do you know that just quit all meaningful work at once, never work again and live off their assets? Almost nobody does that and all these models are built to solve for that scenario, right. So we do a little differently over here, which is a whole other rabbit trail, right.
Speaker 2:But in the 10 to 15 years before they were going to rely heavily on their assets to produce income, you know we estimated saving them probably about $700,000 to $800,000 in taxes. Right, and that's just what we could see with conservative estimates. If their investments do better, then that's going to be even more. But that kind of stuff. You know that $700,000 to $800,000, that's back in their pocket. Now. That and that's not including the opportunity cost, because, as they're saving that money, if they reinvest that money, that money goes into their business, it goes into paying down debt on real estate or it goes into buying more assets. Right now you've got the opportunity cost compounding and that $700,000, $800,000 turns into $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, whatever the case is, and it's simply because of a collaborative conversation between their advisory team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know a lot of people don't realize the magnitude of what you're saying here when professionals propose these tax planning opportunities. So if we can create, you know we're actually we just closed on an engagement where we're going to do some entity structuring that'll save the client money. With that, combined with some other strategies, about $900,000 in taxes per year. Now our fees are going to be pretty high for this, as you can imagine, and rightfully so, and it was more than twice what he was expecting to pay. But not only does this lay down the infrastructure in year one for $900,000 minus our fees, but that's $900,000 a year every year. So in two years we've already created seven figures of wealth for the client.
Speaker 1:When you think about the compounding of the tax savings, in less than 10 years we've created more than $10 million of wealth with the compounding of their tax savings. And sometimes not only does the wealth compound but the tax savings sometimes can be used to purchase more assets that further reduce their taxes, further reduce their taxes, like real estate with cost, say, or oil and gas investments or other investment vehicles that create depreciation. So when you are at a certain level. Leveraging the expertise from these specialists can create such a magnificent impact on your well-being and your wealth. It allows you to retire early. It'll allow you to focus or hire more staff to relieve you of some of the tasks you're doing and have more executive assistance and have an internal recruiter and more protection and all these other vehicles, because you understand how to effectively navigate the tax law.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And you know, for all the listeners out there that are listening to this right, like the case examples that Mark and I went over, that's just the tip of the iceberg, right? I mean, there are so many individual situations that we come across where there's so much opportunity and there's so many more concepts that we don't even have time to mention that we're able to collaborate on and create massive, massive value for people. And where the planning aspect comes in and the collaboration like this with your financial people and your tax people is so important is somebody can work with you, mark, and save that $900,000 a year. But what is the most effective way over time to deploy that, both from a tax efficiency standpoint, from a wealth building standpoint and some of that's going to be relative right, if we're just looking to make the balance sheet as big as possible, that's a different goal than leaving a legacy for your children. That's a different goal than purchasing another business. That's a different goal than right, than reinvesting into the business that you currently have. So there's, you know, there's a lot of different ways that you can now take that savings and try to compound the opportunity. And that's where integrated planning comes in, because, depending on how you choose to compound that. That not only engages the tax planning, it engages the asset protection planning, it engages the insurance planning, it engages the legal right. So, as all these things are happening as a result of each other, there's this domino effect. And you know, it's like you can have all the pieces of the bike right at your feet, but if you don't know how to put it together, the bike doesn't ride. And that's where the collaboration not just at a point in time right, it's not just hey, let's sit down with Mark and Eric and my attorney and let's figure out 10 things that we can do to make the picture better. There's this ongoing collaboration and this ongoing advisory experience that really functions like a private counsel or a board of directors, or maybe simulates what might happen in a family office, so that there's somebody looking around the corner for you as a client. And that's where the strategies today marry with the long-term planning and you can see all the different types of ways that that can pay dividends.
Speaker 2:And beyond the financial, there's also peace of mind. There's a pride in doing the best you can with what you have. There's a relief in doing the best you can with what you have. There's a relief in knowing that you're not paying more than you need to pay. There's a satisfaction in your financial garden being irrigated right to the max with what you're providing it, and that's a peace of mind that is kind of hard to quantify. You can't really put that in a rate of return right, you can't really put that in a, but it's easier right to manage your professional team. You have clarity to evaluate how they're doing and you know that there's collaboration and orchestration occurring to where, when Eric tells you something or Mark tells you something, or you know your business attorney tells you something, the advice is vetted across all the spectrums of your financial strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's really important to have that holistic look. Not only are we talking about investing it into these vehicles, but what happens when we want to take money out of the vehicles and when do we take it out? Take it out, and is the CPA going to coordinate with these guys and let them know what the projected profitability and tax liabilities are resulting from different events? Are they going to facilitate that or not? So it's just an ongoing, ever-evolving story that you need to make sure everybody is in sync with, and not just the CPA shouldn't just be looking at your business income, but your dividend income, investment stock income, interest income, et cetera, et cetera. What I'm wondering also is for our audience listening here.
Speaker 1:So what's the? Some of the people listening here are going to think, okay, oh man, well, you know, there's probably a lot more I should be doing here. I don't even have an asset protection plan and I have, you know, 10 million in net worth or even a couple million in net worth, and maybe they have a couple million in net worth and they just they're a little bit suspicious of some people. They may, you know, some angry tenants or whatever, or maybe these folks are, you know, they're about to enter a new stratosphere of wealth in a breakout year. Where are some of the first steps they can be taking here to level up and getting this team synergy here? What do you think are some of the first steps they can do?
Speaker 2:Well, I give you three first steps that they can do right. The first is to take inventory of your professional team. Most people don't even consider at once who's on their professional team and who they take advice from. You got to identify where the gaps are just never graduated from. Maybe you have a financial advisor, right, but take stock of who's on your team and, to the extent that you want to work with those people, facilitate those introductions. Make sure that they know each other. Make sure that they're in communication. Facilitate those introductions.
Speaker 2:The second thing that I would say is that you know, speaking as a financial planner, the types of things we're talking about. Your advisor should be talking to you about. Your advisor should be talking to you about how your business is structured, not just your CPA. Your advisor should be talking to you about a lot of the tax strategies that you just mentioned. Your advisor should not simply be talking about asset allocation and mutual funds and ETFs and your IRAs and your 401ks and your investment accounts. If that's all they're talking about, what you have is a money manager, not a financial planner.
Speaker 2:A financial planner's primary job is to teach you and give advice based on how every single piece of your financial life talks to each other. So if you really want to have planning and advice that's not product-driven and you want to do the best you can with what you have, your advisor should talk that way, your tax planner should talk that way, right, and they should proactively want to talk to each other. The other thing that I would say is might sound somewhat counterintuitive we should all be informed consumers and we should all do our research, but understand that when you go and do your own research, there's a lot of people with a lot of agendas out there. There's a lot of companies and professionals that are selling a certain product, they're selling a certain service, they're selling a certain way of doing things, and you're going to find all sorts of emotional attitudes and opinions and predispositions around different professional advisors, around different products, around different strategies, and oftentimes that can be confusing, because you might get information that's based on somebody's individual experience that isn't really an accurate mirror of what you need. You might get information from a source that's trying to sell you their particular product or service that's competitive with another one, and they might put that strategy, that type of advisor, down.
Speaker 2:So when you do your own research, do your own research. What you want to find is advisors that are agnostic. They don't have any emotional predispositions and attitudes about any product or service. They're collaborative in mindset, they're abundance-minded, the fees are clear and be an informed consumer. But understand that you can read everything on WebMD. It doesn't make you a doctor, right? You need the right people to take that noise and distillistically minded, to now make that information actionable to you and the benefits to you are immense. I promise you we wouldn't be in business you and I wouldn't be in business if those benefits weren't immense to our clients, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know you made a good point here about you know, like people using web md to diagnose their own sicknesses, and you know it's great to self-educate as best you can, but then I think about it. Like you know, there's a lot of people misinforming on social media. They got some sexy 30 second clips or-long clips to drive attention, but that's all the clips are really. The only value the clips do is they drive attention to whatever influencer. It is Just like news. What news is really designed for is not really. It's designed to educate, but it's more about making your eyebrows. Raise your eyebrows, get you eyebrows, get you angry, get you scared and make you change the channel and watch their ads so they make more money Now.
Speaker 1:So there's always going to be a limit on how much, if you're not a tax professional, you can gain from this public information. That's right in your face. Even my own guy. I have someone chopping up the clips of our podcasts and our webinars and I talk about things that I've done hundreds and thousands of times and, yes, I've dug deeply into the tax code. But when you take a 30-second or 60 or 60 second clip or you don't understand and we don't have enough time to explain all of the other variables that are considered in these ideas and concepts and the disadvantages and the exceptions and the exceptions to the exceptions there's. You can't, you know. There's only so much you can use with this publicly available information. You've got to go to the doctor and get your prescription. In the same way, you've got to go straight to the expert and get a direct recommendation by who looks at your holistic situation.
Speaker 2:That is what we do. That is perfectly said, no-transcript. Your CPA, they should want to engage your business and your estate planning attorneys. They should want to engage the other professionals, because there's a lot of knowledge you have, mark, and your years of doing this business that I just haven't spent as much time in because I'm in a different lane, right. So so there's no matter how much you research and no matter how much you know, there's always more to know. And in the counsel of many, there's wisdom and right, and sometimes there can be.
Speaker 2:You know, what you want in your team at times is you want productive conflict, right? Maybe Mark has one idea and Eric has a slightly different idea, right? And we get in there and talk about it and it's like hey, here's why I think this would be the best idea. Mark says, well, hey, you need to consider what it's going to do over here in your tax situation. And I'm like well, when you look at this over the long term, when we spider this out over the next 10 to 15 years from a planning perspective, here's what we're trying to accomplish that kind of situation can produce ultimately a more effective solution, because all sides of that decision are being looked at and being discussed. So don't be afraid of conflict right? All your advisors don't need to have the same opinion all the time. If they did, it would probably be a problem. That's why you need collaboration. That's why you need advisors that talk to each other. That's why you need to be educated All of us. As advisors, our main job is to be great educators. Right? The client's always the decision maker. What we need to do is provide them clarity so they can make empowered decisions that allow them to do the best they can with what they have, as they determine, is valuable, because not everybody has the same financial goals. Money is a means to an end. Some people, they just want to maximize the balance sheet and they want to buy the yacht. Other people have different goals.
Speaker 2:I think of one business owner that I talked to and, like a lot of business owners, the majority of his wealth was locked in the value of the business and thankfully, he had a value in the business, but exactly how he was going to move off of that, how he was going to sell it, if it was going to be an internal succession plan, right? That was a discussion that we were having, and his goal was to maximize the financial harvest of what he had built, because he needed it and wanted to leave a legacy to his kids. I talked to another business owner a month later and he had bought a lot of life insurance, a ton of life insurance, and he had a business that was probably worth Mark I'd say probably $12 million. So it was a decent business. He started in his 60s. He was in his 80s, first generation American. His parents came from I think it was Iran or something like that, and he did not want to sell the business. He very specifically wanted as little money for the business as possible. He wanted to basically cancel the leases, sell the equipment. He didn't want to sell the business.
Speaker 2:Three kids and he had had a couple siblings and his parents, when they came over from iran, had been very successful entrepreneurs here in america. And he's like eric, I haven't talked to my siblings in 30 years. He said when my dad sold that business, it created so much conflict within the family, um, and you know we all got some good money out of it. But he he told me the story. It unfolded over the course of about a decade and he's like emotionally, basically to honor the memory of the family that I had. Like I can't, like I don't want to create that situation. I'd rather, when I die, there's a big old check. Right, let's take some money out of the business, buy more life insurance if we can. That's why I bought all this life insurance. I want zero money out of this.
Speaker 2:Business made no sense from a mathematical standpoint.
Speaker 2:But just with his personal value system, and for some people some things are an expense and for some people some things are an investment.
Speaker 2:In his particular case, with what he wanted to accomplish very counterintuitive to most of what we do but the way that he values money and the types of recommendations that would appeal to a guy like that are totally different than the first guy. They're trying to accomplish something totally different. So your advisors need to understand why you care about money, right? For the second guy, he wanted to limit as much as possible while he was alive and basically have a massive liquid check, so that what was valuable to him is that there was no possible decision point that his kids could disagree on and that there was no ongoing process when he passed, because he was older at this point 86 years old, I think. So you know him passing through like a long drawn out business transition was a concern. He didn't want to risk it right. So why you care about money is vital to how we give advice, and you need advisors that don't lose sight of that. That's why folks like us collaborate very well together.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so, let's. I couldn't agree more. I mean, we go on for on the stories and there's just so many ways you could take your recommendations. There's so many possibilities to explore with the client as we wrap things up. If someone is interested in learning more about what you do using your services and talking about some of these concepts, what's the best way someone can connect with you?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well. The best way would be to email me at ericcooper C-O-O-P-E-R, at SoonerPFC S-O-O-N-E-R. Paulfrankcharliecom. Our website is wwwsoonerpfccom and there you can find really our philosophy and what it is that we do with clients and why we do what we do. I would be happy to have an individual conversation with anybody.
Speaker 2:Relationships are our best currency, so if there's any way that I can help you along your way, whether you end up working with me or not, that's time well spent to me and we love education. We do a lot of live events here in the Northeast in the New Hampshire and Massachusetts area, greater Boston area, north Shore. So whether it's about estate planning, whether it's about tax efficiency, whether it's about building wealth, you know you can check out our website and, if you're in the area, find any of these live events. We also do quite a few in St Petersburg, florida area. So if you live down there, you know we're definitely on that coast as well, and any way that we can add value to your journey is a win for us. So that's how you can get in touch with us and we'd love to chat with you.
Speaker 1:And also for those of you listening if you happen to be in the Boston area on August 8th and you want to test drive some Aston Martins and you think some of this applies, we'll be talking to some of you folks going live and also if you want to learn about again more about us, markprobertscpacom, to learn more about our services. Eric, thank you so much for sharing your insight today and being a guest. I'm very excited to see you in Boston pretty soon and you listeners. I hope you enjoyed the show and stay tuned for more good action. Thanks, mark.